Provisional Cover
“Most of the people in the world are poor, so if we knew the economics of being poor, we would know much of the economics that really matters …”
Samuel Bowles, Duncan Foley and I (Simon Halliday) have an ongoing joint project writing an intermediate microeconomics textbook: Coordination, Conflict and Competition: A Text in Microeconomics (henceforth CCC). On this site, you will find preliminary content that we are providing to test-teachers who are planning to use draft chapters of the book as well as tips and pointers to do with teaching the book.
Simon, Sam and Duncan at SFI, Summer 2015
If you wish to sign up to be a test-teacher of the book (or even just a test-reader), then please provide your details in the following Google form so that we can gather your details. (If you’re unable to see the embedded form below, then please click here).
We believe the book is now ready to be taught by other professors, especially those interested in how economics has changed over the past thirty years. Once you have reviewed chapters of the book we’ll ask you provide feedback to us in another Google Form (to be provided later).
MBIE, 2006, PUP
Though written for undergraduates, in content CCC has a strong flavor of Sam’s graduate-level textbook, Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution published by Princeton University Press in 2006. As an advanced text, though, it is not suitable for many undergraduate classes because of the high level of the math and certain other aspects of its theoretical rigor.
Introductory page to Chapter 8: Production: Technology, Costs and Supply
Chapter 7: Economies of Scale and the Production Possibilities Frontier
CCC would also be an excellent follow-up text for introductory economics courses that use the Curriculum Open Access Resource in Economics (CORE Project) directed by Wendy Carlin and of which Sam is a co-author. CORE is based on many similar themes to CCC.
We cover many of the standard economic concepts taught to second year economics students including constrained optimization, opportunity costs, trade-offs, complements and substitutes, Nash equilibrium, Pareto efficiency and risk.
But many of the themes of the book are unlikely to be encountered in most intermediate microeconomics texts.
It’s hard to know exactly where your own ideas come from, but for us, those implicated certainly include:
We incubated many of these ideas at the Santa Fe Institute (where Duncan and Sam serve on the faculty), a center of interdisciplinary and dynamic problem-centered modeling.
Below is an abridged table of contents for the first 12 chapters of the book. Currently the first ten chapters are available for distribution with chapters 11 and 12 under active revision over the summer. We plan to have a final part, Part 3, which will go into greater depth on advanced topics, such as the fundamental welfare theorems (and criticisms thereof) and a final reflection on the institutions of capitalism. You can access a more comprehensive draft table of contents here and a copy of the preface here.
| Chapter | Title | Page |
|---|---|---|
| Preface | - | 13 |
| Part 1 | People, Economy & Society | 23 |
| 1 | Society | 27 |
| 2 | People & Preferences | 69 |
| 3 | Doing the Best You can | 105 |
| 4 | An Uncertain & Risky World | 145 |
| 5 | Property & Exchange | 189 |
| 6 | Coordination Failures | 233 |
| Part 2 | Markets | 273 |
| 7 | Specialization, Exchange & Market Demand | 277 |
| 8 | Production: Technologies, Costs & Supply | 329 |
| 9 | Competition, Rent-Seeking & Market Equilibrium | 373 |
| 10 | Information, Contracts & Power | 419 |
| 11 | Jobs, Unemployment, and Wages | 463 |
| 12 | Credit Markets | 501 |
We use calculus in the book, but almost all of the calculus is contained in boxes (named for Alfred Marshall as you will see). We try to follow Marshall’s maxims with the mathematics:
Alfred Marshall, 1906, Letter to Arthur Lyon Bowley. Collected in A. C. Pigou, 1966, Memorials of Alfred Marshall, pp. 427-428.
“I had a growing feeling in the later years of my work at the subject that a good mathematical > theorem dealing with economic hypotheses was very unlikely to be good economics: and I went more and more on the rules
- Use mathematics as a shorthand language, rather than an engine of inquiry.
- Keep to them till you have done.
- Translate into English.
- Then illustrate by examples that are important in real life.
- Burn the mathematics.
- If you can’t succeed in (4), burn (3).
This last I did often."
We may not have burned as much of the mathematics as we ought to have done, but we try to restrain the mathematics to when it is most necessary. For the most part, the economics is conveyed through graphical intuition accompanied by algebra. All of the graphics are also available on github (see Simon Halliday’s github repo bfh-textbook). We hope later to provide interactive versions of the majority of the important graphics programmed either in R with Shiny or Mathematica.
Once we have provided you with draft chapters of the book, I will share a Google drive folder with you that contains slide decks, problem sets, quizzes, worksheets, etc. I have test-taught the book at Smith College and much of this content is based on the course I have taught along with content that Duncan Foley has used when teaching at Eugene Lang College (the undergraduate liberal arts college attached to the New School for Social Research). We are also working with two RAs over the summer to provide additional content before fall 2016 (e.g. the quizzes explained below).
We will be providing access to multiple choice and checkbox quizzes for each chapter which we hope to have for each chapter after the summer. They will use the new Google Quiz interface. Either our RA or I will provide access to the quiz, which an instructor will then be able to duplicate and edit for use with their own classes. Though Google quizzes are not yet as powerful as quizzes on Moodle, Blackboard or Sakai (for example, Google quizzes currently lack integration for mathematical questions), their portability and ease of use suits our needs well for the moment; especially until we have completed negotiations with publishers.
The book has a glossary with all the definitions used in the book. Over the next academic year we hope to turn the definitions into a set of flashcards using Anki. Anki is an open-source flash-card service where the desktop and web-interfaces can be used free of charge, as can the Android app. But, the iOS app version needs to be bought for a fee of $25. As the web interface and desktop versions are free of charge and the notebooks are exportable to other formats, we still think it is the best current option. You will be able to import the flashcard decks to your Anki app when these are made available. They will be provided chapter-by-chapter over AY2016-17.
Our objective is not simply to teach students “how economists think” by training in algorithmic training using toy models, but to to teach economics as a social science: an inquiry into the main problems facing society and the policy options available.
To do this we begin each chapter with one or more empirical puzzles or historical episodes that that economic theory should be able to illuminate. Models are taught as a way of addressing real world problems and questions.
Our approach is informed by the latest ideas in the learning sciences. See, for example, Brown, Roediger and McDaniel, 2014, Make It Stick, Harvard University Press/Belknap Press, Cambridge, MA.